March Madness: The First Four

The New Yorker is about to come down with a case of spring’s most popular catching disease: March Madness. (Our usual bracket manager, Jon Michaud, is busy answering questions about his fine début novel, “When Tito Loved Clara,” which was published last week—leaving this year’s office challenge in my hands.)

If you’ve taken a look at this year’s bracket, you may have noticed that the field of sixty-four isn’t quite set. American sports, like warm gasses, are always looking to expand, and in that spirit, the N.C.A.A. decided last year to invite sixty-eight teams to this year’s party. So we’ve been given a new alliterative gimmick in the tournament: the First Four, a round of play-in games on Tuesday and Wednesday in Dayton, Ohio, which perhaps was judged the most neutral city in America.

There are two kinds of games in this new setup. First, four teams from smaller conferences get to fight for the slight honor of being a sixteen seed in the real first round later in the week. For these teams—Alabama State, University of Texas at San Antonio, University of North Carolina at Asheville, and University of Arkansas at Little Rock (rule of thumb: the longer the name, the worse the team’s chances)—it is, as the saying goes in Hollywood, truly an honor to be nominated. (No sixteen seed has ever beaten a number one.) In the past, when the field was set at sixty-five, there was a single play-in game of this type. Now we’re treated to another.

The two other early games pit middling major conference teams against each other, a novel situation, but also not much of a draw. Last year, teams with these résumés would have been left out, bound for the other spring college-basketball tournament, the N.I.T. This year, they get to play in Dayton, competing for open eleven and twelve seeds in the real tournament. Sounds thrilling, yes? Well, no. Clemson, University of Alabama Birmingham, University of Southern California, and Virginia Commonwealth University are each hovering around ten losses for the regular season, and contests between them would have a hard time cracking the national-television schedule in January. Now sports fans horrified at the prospect of having to spend a couple of days without college basketball have been rescued from opening a book or spending time with their kids: we’ve got more games, more ads, more Madness.

Some have noticed that the new format disrupts the time-honored weeklong process of filling out a bracket. Eleven and twelve seeds often upset their higher-ranked opponents, so brackets can’t be completed until we know the outcome of the last game on Wednesday night. It’s a small change, but sports fans are creatures of habit. First timers and casual players, though, won’t notice much of a difference. And it might have been much worse. Last year, before the N.C.A.A. settled on sixty-eight teams, some were predicting an even bigger expansion, to ninety-six. We’ve been spared another week of the tournament for now, but N.C.A.A. vice-president Greg Shaheen recently told the A.P. that further expansion is “always on the list of topics.” There are three hundred and forty-six Division 1 basketball teams, why not invite them all? Who wouldn’t like to see the honorably named Centenary Gentlemen from Shreveport, Louisiana, (1-29 this season) get their shot?

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